The Wrecker

26

THE FOLLIES ORCHESTRA STOPPED PLAYING ABRUPTLY. AN eerie silence gripped the theater. Then debris clattered on the tin roof like a thousand snare drums. Glass flew out of the skylight, and everyone in the theater-audience, stagehands, and chorus girls-began screaming.

Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott moved as one, up the aisle, through the canvas rain curtains and across the roof to the outside staircase. They saw a red glow in the southwest sky in the direction of Jersey City.

“The powder pier,” said Bell with a sinking heart. “We better get over there.”

“Look,” said Archie as they started down the stairs. “Broken windows everywhere.”

Every building on the block had lost a window. Forty-fourth Street was littered with broken glass. They turned their backs on the crowds surging in panic on Broadway and ran west on Forty-fourth toward the river. They crossed Eighth Avenue, then Ninth, and ran through the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, dodging the residents spilling out of saloons and tenements. Everyone was shouting “What happened?”

The Van Dorn detectives raced across Tenth Avenue, over the New York Central Railroad tracks, across Eleventh, dodging fire engines and panicked horses. The closer they got to the water, the more broken windows they saw. A cop tried to stop them from running onto the piers. They showed their badges and brushed past him.

“Fireboat!” Bell shouted.

Bristling with fire monitors and belching smoke, a New York City fireboat was pulling away from Pier 84. Bell ran after it, jumped. Abbott landed beside him.

“Van Dorn,” they told the startled deckhand. “We have to get to Jersey City.”

“Wrong boat. We’re dispatched downtown to spray the piers.”

The reason for the fireboat’s orders was soon apparent. Across the river, flames were shooting into the sky from the Jersey City piers. With the end of the rain, the wind had shifted west, and it was blowing sparks across the river onto Manhattan’s piers. So instead of helping fight the fire in Jersey City, the fireboat was wetting down Manhattan’s piers to keep the sparks from igniting their roofs and wooden ships moored alongside.

“He’s a mastermind,” said Bell. “I’ve got to hand him that.”

“A Napoleon of crime,” Archie agreed. “As if Conan Doyle sicced Professor Moriarty on us instead of Sherlock Holmes.”

Bell spotted a New York Police Department Marine Division launch at the Twenty-third Street Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. “Drop us there!”

The New York cops agreed to run them across the river. They passed damaged boats with sails in tatters or smokestacks toppled by the blast. Some were adrift. On others, crewmen were jury-rigging repairs sufficient to get them to shore. A Jersey Central Railroad ferry limped toward Manhattan, its windows shattered and its superstructure blackened.

“There’s Eddie Edwards!”

Edwards’s white hair had been singed black, and his eyes were gleaming in a face of soot, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“Thank God you telephoned, Isaac. We got the gun in place in time to stop the bastards.”

“Stop them? What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t blow the powder pier.” He pointed through the thick smoke. “The dynamite train is O.K.”

Bell peered through the smoke and saw the string of cars. The five that been sitting there when he left Jersey City last evening to take the night off at the Follies were still there.

“What did they blow up? We felt it in Manhattan. It broke every window in the city.”

“Themselves. Thanks to the Vickers.”

Eddie described how they had driven off the Southern Pacific steam lighter with machine-gun fire.

“She turned around and took off after a schooner. We saw them in company earlier. I would guess that the schooner probably took their crew off. After the murdering scum locked the helm and aimed her at the pier.”

“Did your gunfire detonate the dynamite?”

“I don’t think so. We shot her wheelhouse to pieces, but she didn’t explode. She bore off, turned a full hundred eighty degrees, and steamed away. Must have been three, four minutes before the dynamite exploded. One of the boys on the Vickers thought he saw her hit the schooner. And we all saw her sails in the flash.”

“It’s almost impossible to detonate dynamite by impact,” Bell mused. “They must have devised a trigger of some sort … How do you see it, Eddie? How did they get their hands on the Southern Pacific steam lighter?”

“The way I see it,” said Edwards, “they ambushed the lighter upriver, shot McColleen, and threw the crew overboard.”

“We must find their bodies,” Bell ordered in a voice heavy with sorrow. “Archie, tell the cops on both sides of the river. Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, New York, Brooklyn, Staten Island. The Van Dorn Agency wants every body that washes up. I will pay for decent burials for our man and the innocent crew of the lighter. We must identify the criminals who were working for the Wrecker.”

Dawn broke on a scene of devastation that stretched to both sides of the harbor. Where six Communipaw piers had pushed into the river now there were only five. The sixth had burned to the water-line. All that remained of it were blackened pilings and a heap of ruined boxcars poking out of the tide. Every window on the river side of the Jersey Central passenger terminal was broken, and half its roof was blown off. A ferry that had been moored there listed drunkenly, struck by an out-of control tugboat that had holed her hull and was still pressed into her like a nursing lamb. The masts of ships beside the piers were splintered, tin roofs and the corrugated sides of pier shacks were scattered, the sides of boxcars split open with cargo spilling out. Bandaged railroad workers, injured by flying glass and falling debris, were poking through the ruins of the rail yards, and the frightened residents of the nearby slums could be seen trudging away with their possessions on their backs.

The most incongruous sight Bell saw in the dull morning light was that of the stern of a wooden sailing schooner that had been blown out of the water and landed on a triple-tracked car float. From across the Hudson, there were reports of thousands of broken windows in lower Manhattan and the streets littered with glass.

Abbott nudged Bell.

“Here comes the boss.”

A trim New York Police launch with a low cabin and a short stack was approaching. Joseph Van Dorn stood on the foredeck in a topcoat with a newspaper tucked under his arm.

Bell walked directly to him.

“It is time for me to submit my resignation.”